The development of American accent in songs of Arctic Monkeys
Date
2021
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Tartu Ülikool
Abstract
Arctic Monkeys, a British renowned band, and their lead singer Alex Turner has been
the subject of phonetic analysis on two occasions – Beal (2009) analysed his choice of accent
and dialectal words based on one song and Flanagan (2019) analysed his accent and lexis in
order to find whether he has begun to sound less regional (the band is from Sheffield) over his
career from 2006 to 2018. However, no research has been conducted to see whether Turner’s
accent has become more American, which has been the assumption by media (Petridis 2018;
Wilkinson 2016). Therefore, this thesis contributes to this knowledge gap by answering two
research questions:
a) Is it phonetically evident that Alex Turner’s singing accent in the songs of Arctic
Monkeys has changed to sound more American from 2006 to 2018?
b) If this change is evident, what could the possible reasons for such a shift in accent be?
Description
Keywords
USA-5 mudel, Arctic Monkeys